Archive for September, 2011

When 80 percent of your base disagrees with you about giving in-state tuition to illegals, in some cases thus favoring them over the children of members of your base who might be attending a school from out of state, and you call them heartless, it is a wonder there aren’t more protests like this.

It wasn’t just rude and utterly arrogant. It shows there’s a fuse blown in that head of his somewhere. What is he capable of saying or doing on the campaign trail against Obama if he doesn’t get that you don’t twitch-slap your base in a highly competitive primary.

Here’s the big story on Perry everyone is missing. The apology wasn’t. Imagine in a fit of anger someone you are in a relationship or marriage with calls you heartless. Think about what a slap that is coming from someone who knows you best, who should be the best advocate for your betterment and your interests.

The next day they apologize and tell you it was said in a fit of anger, and that of course it isn’t true. You really aren’t heartless. That is what is necessary for the relationship to go forward without damage.

Raleigh has been poised for years to pass Charlotte as the South’s new “it” city. It has been gaining on Charlotte in the competition to be the biggest growth engine in the state in terms of economics, something unthinkable a decade ago

Raleigh: The New NC Jobs Engine and "It" Southern City?

This is why Raleigh now often bypasses Charlotte in national city ranking surveys. It internals are just better in a lot of categories, like those that measure things like cost of living and income and job growth. And now this. Raleigh, WTVD reports, is showing growth despite the recession, especially downtown. And this:

According to the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, the capital city has 5,000 more residents within a two mile radius of the downtown area than Charlotte does.

According to local thinking, this shouldn’t be possible. Raleigh lacks light rail (they keep studying it) and doesn’t have a trolley. It has no major professional sports teams and just one Fortune 500 company to our nine. Unlike Charlotte, it has an unimpressive airport of little national import, and it is definitely not a tourist destination.

So how has Raleigh been doing this? Actual targeted business development, the kind Charlotte has talked about for years but that Raleigh has actually practiced for years. Raleigh has the natural advantage of a university system it can use to attract business while Charlotte has always counted on the continued growth of the financial services industry. But what is making a difference is that Raleigh has aggressively sold the area as a destination for business, while Charlotte has aggressively sold itself as a destination for tourism. I explained this in 2009 in Creative Loafing:

Raleigh is ringed with three prominent universities, which have led to the area having one of the country’s most educated work forces. The universities have been part of the fabric of the area for years, though. What’s really setting Raleigh apart are its leaders’ organized efforts to capitalize on the schools and sell the area as a destination city for businesses, rather than tourists. Raleigh has one of the lowest costs of doing business in the nation and a determined, focused effort to sell itself that has led to an exploding life-sciences industry and a booming biotech hub.

Wake County Economic Development has a fine-tuned strategy for going after the county’s four target industries: biotech, advanced medical technologies, advanced learning technologies and non-woven textiles. That strategy has paid off.

As I reported last year, a Milken Institute survey found that Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area has the nation’s fastest growing work force in the life-sciences industries and the best success rate for bringing biotechnology research ideas to market. (Can you even name the four industries Charlotte is aggressively focused on targeting? I can’t either.)

And that is the problem. Since Mayor Pat McCrory, local leaders have been mumbling about growing a green energy sector — like the leaders of most of the rest of the major cities in this country. That became hot after Obama started throwing around billions in green job money. But there was never a serious effort to build the sector.

That’s what Charlotte needs right now. A highly targeted plan to recruit very specific industries it can sell its strengths to. I think local leaders are keenly aware of this behind closed doors, which is why they are belatedly pouring millions into the development of the university system and colleges here.

Charlotte needs to do more than hope for green jobs money from Obama. It needs a plan and a capable group of people to execute it.

Shea Roseboro is back out on bond again. This time it is $1,000 bond for driving with his license revoked. Last month it was for damaging computers. Meckdeck.com and CrimeinCharlotte.com have tracked his unbelievable criminal career over several years.

Roseboro is one of Charlotte’s most prolific criminals. What makes his story so compelling is that under former DA Peter Gilchrist, we’d expect him to still be wandering the streets no matter what he did until he killed a couple of people, which was par for the course with Gilchrist. But the new DA, Andrew Murray, we were told that repeat criminals would now be targeted for long(er) prison sentences, and that a partnership with the police would help identify them.

So why has Roseboro only done a year in prison TOTAL for all of this (see his record below via crimeincharlotte.com). :

‘Teflon Shea’ Roseboro: One of Charlotte’s Finest Thugs

UPDATE II: 7/19/11– Shea Roseboro was arrested AGAIN on 7/16/11… this time for selling drugs. He posted his $5,000 bond and was back on the streets within hours. Next time you get arrested, tell them you want “Shea Roseboro treatment” UPDATE:6/16/11– Shea Roseboro was arrested again and released the same day after posting $5,000 bond.

6/1/2011– It never ends in Mecklenburg County! The ‘revolving door‘ of the justice system is enough to make me spit nails! I was skimming through today’s arrests and I could not believe my eyes when I saw Mr. Shea Roseboro pop up on the screen AGAIN!

In April 2010, Shea Roseboro shot a man on Lakewood Ave. He was out of jail being tracked by ‘electronic monitoring’ at the time- so he “cut and ran.” The VCAT Team searched and found Roseboro so back to jail he went… 33 times since he turned 16 years old. I can only imagine his juvenile record!

On May 6, 2011, the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office released the following statement: “Shea Roseboro, 21, pled guilty to interfering with an electronic monitoring device and damaging computers. Roseboro was sentenced to 15-18 months in prison, suspended for 36 months of supervised probation with 120 days in jail by Judge Constangy.”

Can someone please tell me why Shea Roseboro was given a $500 bond and is back out on the streets… after getting arrested again today? Shea Roseboro is 21 years old. He has shot two people, has been arrested in Mecklenburg County 33 times in 5 years and he is STILL walking the streets of Charlotte! Sick yet?

Whatever the truth, and that will come out shortly, it is insane that Cook’s career has survived one domestic violence incident, forget two. Male officers have been fired after just one, as they should be. The same should apply to Cook.

Say, how about turning your medical records over to the federal government? Don’t worry about where you should mail them. Your insurance company will be required to send them for you thanks to the new health care law.

This is for your own good, so that the government can make sure your doctor is doing the job they way the government thinks he should. It’s just one of many nasty Obamacare surprises that those who read the bill and members of the alternative media warned were coming — and that the MSM ignored.

This is supposedly necessary so that government can monitor your doctor:

The HHS attempts to justify its proposal on the grounds that it has to be able to compare performance.

Let me translate that. The federal government will be monitoring your doctor’s performance to make sure you aren’t getting better medical care than someone else, or that you aren’t getting it more quickly than someone else.

Under the new health care law, everyone will wait longer for medical care, it will cost more for most and the odds are many employers will drop you, the Tennessean reports. That will wallop the middle class because the subsidies on the exchange aren’t close to what your employer was paying, so you’ll have to come up with thousands more a year out of pocket to pay for health care. That was no accident by the way. The whole Obamacare monstrosity is nothing but a health care redistribution plan. The American people are going to love this.

Inspired by a Hollywood movie about a man who cut off his own arm to save himself after being trapped by a boulder in the same canyon, a man from Concord crawled four days across the Utah desert after breaking his leg on a solo hike in the same canyon, the Associated Press reports.

Of course. Who wouldn’t want to try this solo after seeing this movie?

Amos Wayne Richards, 64, was inspired to hike Little Blue John Canyon after he saw the Oscar-nominated movie “127 Hours” but fell 10 feet during his trek on Sept. 8, the AP says.

Here’s my favorite part:

Without cellphone service and only two protein bars to eat, Richards began crawling back to his car across the rocky terrain. He filled his water bottles with rain as he painstakingly retraced his steps, eventually dragging himself almost five miles.

If it were me, I wouldn’t be giving interviews. I’d be too embarrassed.

So says Businessweek.com. Charlotte came in 20th, which most cities would envy. What does it mean? As I’ve been writing for years, Raleigh began to pass Charlotte by in these national ranking surveys a few years back. Ten years ago, Charlotte was the hot and upcoming new Southern thing. Now Raleigh is.

That’s probably because on most quality of life indicators, Raleigh ranks slightly higher than Charlotte. And because Raleigh is up and coming and these ranking schemes like to find the new hot thing.

Still, I wonder if Raleigh will ever achieve that seat in the hip top ten nationally that Charlotte has craved for so long. I mean to be automatically included on the mental list with Austin, Phoenix, Sacramento and places like that. I’ve long said to watch Raleigh. It focused on targeted business recruitment over the last two decades while Charlotte focused on uptown trinkets. That focus, for Raleigh, is paying off.

But is that something we should advertise? In order to qualify, your school district has to be large, poor and failing. Large numbers of your students have to be poor, minority and failing.

Then to win, poor minority students have got to fail a little less compared to other kids who are failing in other large, urban districts in the state. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools scores have improved slightly in recent years. But our graduation/dropout rates, one of the key factors in who wins the Broad Prize, are actually WORSE than the rest of the state for minorities, the poor and overall. But since large, broke, failing urban school districts are only compared to other similar districts in the state, CMS looks fantastic, even though its students fail to graduate MORE OFTEN than those across the state as a whole.

Hence, CMS is failing, just not as badly as three other urban districts in the state it is competing against.

Where CMS really maims children is in its graduation rates for economically disadvantaged kids. Across the state, 62% of them graduate. In CMS, only 52% do.

CMS: Beating the State in Dropouts

CMS’ graduation rate for Blacks is 55 %, statewide it is 63%. Charlie Sheen would have two words for this: not winning.

Here’s a rundown from an article called “Not making the grade: Facts on graduation; GETTING THAT DIPLOMA,” Charlotte Observer, May 30, 2010:

NORTH CAROLINA: Statewide last year, the overall graduation rate was 71.8 percent.

The rates for subgroups:

Blacks: 63.2 percent

Hispanics: 59 percent

Whites: 77.1 percent

Asians: 83.7 percent

Economically disadvantaged: 61.8 percent

Limited English proficiency (LEP), 52.1 percent.

IN CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG

OVERALL: In Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the graduation rate was 66.1 percent last year.

Bank of America could file for partial bankruptcy. The bank already plans to cut at least 30,000 jobs, most of them the kind headquartered in Charlotte. Though no one will admit it publicly, the bank’s headquarters here is clearly on the bank’s chopping block. It won’t last but a few more years, if that.

The Charlotte plan?

Build a streetcar that will (and already has) cost tens of millions of dollars. Here is what I don’t get:

The 1.5-mile project will connect Presbyterian Hospital, CPCC and Time Warner Cable arena and is expected to create hundreds of construction-related jobs.

Have you noticed how no one says what the purpose of the streetcar actually is? I’m not certain that anyone really knows, other than that it would just be cool to have.

How many people are going to take the streetcar from Presby to CPCC? Why would anyone do that? Why would anyone go from the arena to CPCC? Or from Presby to the arena? It’s 1.5 miles. That’s not even worth the trouble to park, get out and get on. So they’ll have to build the rest of it for it to make any sense.

But that will cost at least half a billion dollars, some of which will come from the feds no doubt, but at least half of which would have to come straight out of the city general fund budget. Even from the uptown crowd perspective — what the heck is the point? Especially when it would compete directly with light rail?